David Gerard wrote:
The 20MB upload limit has come up a fair few times on these mailing lists and the only objections I remember relate to whether we have the resources to handle larger files. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I can't see any problems in doubling our upload limit to 40MB straight away to enable more/better quality image and sound files to be uploaded. We should further discuss and investigate the impact of raising the limit further so we can start storing reasonable film formats and files (I, personally, cannot wait until the limit is high enough to allow us to provide reasonable quality early silent films).
Ideally, the upload limit will eventually be high enough to allow us to provide lossless data files (with classical music movements of up to ~20MB, this would need to be up to 100 MB lossless music in FLAC format). The feasibility of serving 100MB files over HTTP still needs to be discussed, but I can't see how a 40MB limit would cause us any problems or cost us significant resources.
I doubt our servers have any problem with normal upload usage. If newbies started uploading isos, maybe... So, based on the asumption that goodwilling users won't damage the servers (and if so it'd mean new disks are needed) nor upload copyvios which will deleted and fill space in the deleted storage: What about creating a new permission (+new group +reviewing UserRights so bureucrats can give it) 'unlimited-size-upload' to bypass the file size limit? That way, users could upload big files after requesting (a process which policy should make quite easy), as opposed to raising the limit for everyone. There could also be some group with an intermediate limit, but 11645 is a blocker (i recall it needed reviewing?) as giving it to sysops, while useful wouldn't be those most needing it, which would be some bots and certain users.
As i'm thinking about this, it could also be added as a size limit associated with each user (defaulted to $wgMaxUploadSize or a magic number meaning wiki's default) so setting it to 0 would fix the old bug 4995 and its clone 6670.
PS: I'm aware raising the limit means changing php.ini (or using url upload ;) ) . Ideally, receiving the file would be made by a CGI and not by php.